Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Daily Report, March 15, 2020

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took responsibility for a large loophole in emergency paid sick leave legislation.

First Response

Nancy Pelosi engineered the second coronavirus response bill, which includes free testing and paid emergency leave and passed through the House early Saturday morning. She personally negotiated the bill with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. So when it became clear that there was a huge loophole in the paid leave section, exempting employers with more than 500 workers, she took some heat. The New York Times editorial headline screamed, “There’s a Giant Hole in Pelosi’s Coronavirus Bill.”

The aforementioned “giant hole” also gives small businesses under 50 employees the ability to apply for a hardship exemption. Put the two together and you get 80 percent of all private business employees who wouldn’t be guaranteed sick or emergency leave under the bill. That overstates the issue, because a lot of those employees are already covered by sick leave policies, particularly office workers at those big companies. Jim Tankersley of the Times put the math at around 20 million workers in businesses with fewer than 50 employees or more than 500 who don’t have paid sick leave; that’s about 13 percent of the workforce, not 80.

However, we don’t know what kind of sick leave that is. And it’s likely to be better for midlevel managers than front-line retail clerks or warehouse workers; that’s who really gets screwed here. “Retail corporations like Walmart don’t care about associates like me,” said Jaycee Gordon, a member of United for Respect, a coalition fighting for better rights at big-box retail stores. “I quit last week because I am pregnant and am at high-risk of contracting coronavirus. I wasn’t receiving any accommodations from my store management to protect me and my family so I chose to leave even though I can’t afford to be out of work.”

Big businesses have responded to pressure to change sick leave policies. But that’s a piecemeal, uncertain solution, especially for companies with franchises where the policy will be left to the franchisee. Congress had the opportunity to protect these people and didn’t take it.

Defenders of Pelosi, however, took the criticism as unfair. She had to negotiate with the White House and create something that Mitch McConnell would take up, and speed was of the essence, the defenders asserted. She had to get whatever she could get. My view initially was, however true that is, she could have explained the stakes to the public, so they would know exactly who to blame for this loophole.

Well, on Saturday evening, Pelosi did identify who to blame: her. “I don’t support U.S. taxpayer money subsidizing corporations to provide benefits to workers that they should already be providing,” Pelosi wrote in a tweet thread. “Large employers and corporations must step up to the plate and offer paid sick leave and paid family & medical leave to their workers.”

In other words, Pelosi wasn’t forced to insert a loophole for large corporations. She did it willingly, to save federal money. For someone who gave a speech in honor of the late deficit hawk and would-be destroyer of the social safety net Pete Peterson on the House floor, this isn’t that big a shock. But for someone using the hashtag #FamiliesFirst and simultaneously telling poor, vulnerable families during a pandemic that they should just tell powerful executives to “step up to the plate,” without any help from the government, it is just appalling.

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It’s not merely Republicans that have to be fought, sadly. It’s the corrosive leadership of the Democrats, too.

Vital Stats

The CDC does not update its statistics on the weekend, because I guess nobody gets sick then? So its Friday estimate of 1,629 total U.S. cases of COVID-19 and 41 deaths is even a bigger undercount than normal.

The COVID-19 Tracker estimates 22,021 completed tests within the country as of March 14, up from 17,892 the day before (One of those includes President Trump, who said he tested negative). The tracker shows 2,768 positive cases and 54 deaths. This is growing exponentially.

Home Occupation

I went to El Sereno, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, yesterday morning to watch two unhoused families and a man who was previously living in his car move into a vacant property. Supporters pulled furniture out of a U-Haul and chanted in Spanish and English, led by a young boy named Gustavo.

This scene was supposed to be repeated throughout the neighborhood, all owned by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and empty for years. Reclaiming Our Homes, the ad hoc organization of unhoused families, planned to occupy six Caltrans properties, out of more than 200 in the neighborhood. But early Saturday morning, police arrested two individuals who were breaking into one of the homes to “reclaim” it. Only one home would be occupied on Saturday, though activists promised more to come.

“With the coronavirus pandemic, we are urging that vacant houses become homes,” said Ruby Gordillo, a stay-at-home mother of three (ages 14, 12, and 8) who moved into the Caltrans house, after living in unstable housing nearby. “There are homeless people all around the sidewalks, my children see them on walks. We want them to be in a safe place.”

Gordillo’s family joined Marta Escudero and her two kids, and Benito Flores, a homeless man, in occupying the two-bedroom house. “My family is not a squatter,” Escudero said. “We’re paying for these homes, they’re state-owned and empty.” Flores agreed. “This is not a crime, this is justice,” he said.

Alex Caputo-Pearl, the head of United Teachers Los Angeles, expressed support at a morning press conference, and vowed resources to be “on the barricades” if authorities tried to evict the Reclaimers. The group sent an open letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom Saturday morning, asking for protection as they occupy the homes and demanding that all unused government-owned property be directed to house people without other means of support. “It is common knowledge that the public is safer if people have the ability to self-quarantine and safely self-isolate in a home,” they wrote. I posted more excerpts in this Twitter thread.

David Dayen

The home interior

Moms 4 Housing, the group in Oakland who were a model for the Reclaimers’ occupation, released a supportive statement. “This pandemic is highlighting the profound injustice of a society that says some people deserve a roof over their heads and some don’t. Housing, like health care, is a human right.”

Ruby Gordillo told me she was excited to move into the house, even if it didn’t have utilities. “They’re going to have somewhere to play, some fresh air,” she said. “My kids deserve a decent home.”

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I’m live-streaming the Democratic presidential debate tonight. Through a new app called HotMic, you can “watch” the debate along with me and get my live commentary. All you have to do is download the free HotMic app, and on debate night (8pm ET Sunday) use this invite code: DAVID122.

Finally, if you have stories about how you’re dealing with COVID-19, email me at ddayen-at-prospect-dot-org.

The View from Your Window

Here’s reader SS in Salt Lake City, Utah, expressing a concern I have that not enough Americans are recognizing the threat:

Gatherings in SLC limited to 100 healthy people, or 20 if you’re ill or at risk… Big deal to cancel groups that size, as there’s a church on every corner and a lot of them have well over 100 people. There are activities at them almost every day.

General feeling: My mom and I have been taking it seriously, and Utah is pretty good about disaster preparedness. The church teaches self-reliance and the members take it seriously. They know that one day a giant earthquake is going to hit here and they’ve been preparing for a long time. Also a lot of scam dehydrated food companies and prep stores.

My brothers have taken it as seriously as SARS or H1N1. They believe it’s real, but don’t quite believe it’s as bad as people say, and still just assume it’s like getting the flu. Last night they went to a wrestling event here in Salt Lake in an arena with a capacity of 12,000. Chris Jericho, wrestler guy, has spoken publicly about his disbelief that coronavirus is a threat at all.

I have seen e-mails from golf store owners and the CEO of Worldwide Golf Shops where they cancelled a big trade show or something they were going to have. CEO said he feels like a “pussy” and assured his store owners that he wasn’t doing this because of “the media BS.” My brother lives in a more rural part of the state, and he says the attitude is very much “fake news.” People saying they won’t wash their hands, laughing, saying our Governor is overreacting, etc.

Today I Learned

The scene last night in Chicago and other airports, where new screening regimes and a lack of manpower caused 6-hour waits and cheek-by-jowl backups, was inhumane and dangerous. (Chicago Sun-Times)

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